/ A Featured Work of IATC (HK) Critics Awards 2020 /
In 2021, the pandemic certainly affected our society, our culture, especially our culture of communications, and invoked our deep reflection on art and the development of our society. That presented us opportunities to carry out dialectic discourses on our experimentation and its creative process, as well as allowing us to examine the very nature of art, which includes the evaluation of the virtuality and the realness in the context of the present technological advancement. The pandemic reminds us the disconnection between our developed society and its respective environmental ecology, so much so that the health and education systems are not on par with our needs in reality. The interactions between the system and technology becomes an important issue.
To be staged at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in July this year, 2 or 3 Things About Interrupted Dream which is developed from the excerpt In Praise of the Portrait of the kunqu (opera) Peony Pavilion created in Ming dynasty, aims at getting inspired by looking at a “portrait” out of the frame/context. What is different is that, today, we are trying to examine the history by experimenting the migration of a painted portrait into the forms of “photo”, “film” and “reality TV”. That is to explore and evaluate how theatre being a framework and the vehicle of communications, so as to reflect on how the notion of theatre being challenged by the ever-available public space/media with the aid of current technology. Seemingly, the portrait used in the Peony Pavilion metaphors idol worship, while our simile is to discuss the virtuality and the realness of the media in a theatre play.
